Myth of the Good Girl
“Is she in the room with us right now?”
By Nithya Venkat with art by Natalie Williams
My life lately has been a lot of introspection. Lots of vision boards, lots of goal setting, lots of affirmations, and a lot of tears. “I just wanna be a good person” I mutter like a prayer while I take a 20-minute shower hoping to scrub myself into a better version of myself. I have spent so many nights trying to figure out if I am a good person or if I’m not or whatever it may be. Do boys not like me because I’m a bad person? Are they uncovering who I really am? Men tell me I’m mean and that I’m selfish and it always used to boggle my mind because no woman has ever said that to me. And the answer to this question is and always has been “the patriarchy.” The stereotype of the good girl is as old as time. From the girl in class who doesn’t talk to boys, to the perfect housewife, to the “clean girl it girl”, men reinvent a new image of what a ‘good woman’ is whenever they want to serve whatever they want. And the goalpost will always move. So let’s understand where this stereotype originates, how it affects women, and how to break the shackles of good girl-ism.
The currency of the patriarchy is controlling women, and put simply, that is why the idea of ‘the good girl’ exists. There's an image in our minds of the good girl. The girl who’s not too much or too little. Who works hard but not so hard that she sacrifices relationships. Who prioritizes her man without being clingy. This idea is so pervasive that Gillian Flynn wrote a book about a woman who stages her own death to frame her husband because she was so tired of being a ‘good girl.’ And it’s sad and sick that Gone Girl reads like a perverse fantasy of female rage. In her book “Break the Good Girl Myth” Majo Mofino writes “It’s because our society has conditioned too many of us to believe that we will be rewarded only when we are being nice, playing by the rules, and working hard.” And in an interpersonal sense, this gives men the power to tell us when we are not being ‘good.’ Being good is being easy. It’s about not having needs, or voicing your needs, or expressing your feelings. Because we’re told if we don’t ask for anything, we will somehow meet someone who will give us everything we want. Put simply, good girl-ism exists to make women feel needy for having needs, and to create a culture where we constantly add to the laundry list of what makes a woman ‘enough.’
And how does this affect women? Well, it affects us badly. I’ve spent too many nights with my close friends, my acquaintances, and even strangers in the bar bathroom crying about how to make ourselves enough for guys. It doesn’t matter how hot we are, how smart we are, how successful we are, and how much we know it. Men somehow succeed in making us feel like we are not enough. They say things like we’re mean when we’re honest, we’re narcissistic when we’re confident, and we’re clingy when we try to apologize. And it fuels this never-ending cycle of trying to figure out how exactly we need to play the game to win whatever we’re supposed to win. And here’s my reality check for all women reading this: you are the prize! The game of the good girl is a spiral. And we don’t need to be good girls.
Good has always been subjective. It will always mean something else to every man who wants something different. We will never be good enough. We shatter the myth of the good girl when we stop caring. We don’t need to be good girls. We need to be people of integrity. And that’s something that comes from within. So I will keep journaling, keep self-affirming, keep manifesting, and I will keep making good decisions, bad decisions, and everything in between because that’s what it means to be human. I am no longer a good girl, because I’m focused on being human.